Redmond School Board Positions 1-2: Candidates discuss equity, mental health, community

Published 2:15 am Wednesday, May 12, 2021

The Redmond School Board races are the most competitive in Central Oregon this year. Eleven candidates are vying for four seats in the May 18 election, and only one — board chair Shawn Hartfield — is an incumbent.

This is a sharp turnaround from the 2019 board elections, where one incumbent ran unopposed and the other incumbent only had one challenger.

The Bulletin asked the Redmond School Board candidates the same questions about guns in schools, COVID-19, the district’s new equity task force, and more.

Position 1

With the school board guaranteed to have at least three new members next school year, Hartfield said her nearly six years of experience would serve Redmond schools well.

“Whether I get elected or not, we’re going to have a very new board,” Hartfield, 50, said. “It’s important to have somebody there with the knowledge and experience that I have.”

Besides serving on the board, Hartfield works in human resources for Buckstop Truckware, a Prineville auto bumper manufacturer, and teaches business classes at Central Oregon Community College. She has three kids in Redmond schools: one each at Sage Elementary and Obsidian and Elton Gregory middle schools.

Once the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, Hartfield wants to push for more extracurricular activities for elementary students, she said.

“In our elementary schools, we have not done a great job in developing extracurricular activities,” she said. “Chess club in each school, bringing music back in … It would build a community of parents that want to bring their kids to school every day.”

Hartfield and the Redmond School Board also created an equity task force for the district in September, intended to address inequities in local schools, combat explicit and implicit racism and diversify the district’s work force.

The task force has done well getting set up this year, Hartfield said, but she’d push them to set concrete goals if re-elected.

“That way it’s not a task force in idea, it’s a task force that’s actually moving forward to doing something that would be measurable to all students,” she said.

One of the equity task force’s members, Stephanie Hunter, is Hartfield’s lone challenger.

Hunter is a behavioral specialist at the Opportunity Foundation of Central Oregon, a Redmond nonprofit that supports people with disabilities. She is the mother of a senior at Redmond Proficiency Academy charter school and a foster son who is in a post-graduate high school program for students with developmental disabilities.

Many of Hunter’s top concerns have to do with helping schools and students recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Those include making sure attendance bounces back next year after a sudden drop, improving school air filtration systems to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and investing in students’ mental health.

“Our kids have been through trauma,” said Hunter, 46. “We need to prioritize individual attention, especially for kids who have not done well.”

Teachers’ mental health is also something Hunter worries about. If elected, she’d push for providing counseling for teachers, donating spa gift cards and enforcing a more reasonable work-life balance.

“I think it should be normalized that teachers don’t work evenings and weekends,” Hunter said.

One of Hunter’s strengths is her drive to connect with the Redmond community and bring their ideas to the table, she said.

“I have been a bridge-builder for 20 years,” she said. “I will go anywhere and I will talk to anyone.”

Position 2

As a teenager in Redmond, Michelle Salinas had to temporarily drop out of school to take care of her younger sisters after her parents abandoned them.

Salinas eventually re-enrolled at Redmond High School, earned her diploma and now serves as the assistant branch manager at Bank of America in Redmond. She wants to be on the school board so local schools can better assist students who went through tough times like she did.

“I was an underprivileged child who had to struggle for everything,” said Salinas, 40. “I want more representation of those underprivileged children.”

Salinas has two children at Hugh Hartman Elementary School. She was also the co-chair and manager for the political action committee that helped pass the Redmond schools bond last November.

Some of Salinas’ biggest concerns are keeping students safely in schools in-person, addressing post-COVID-19 learning loss and supporting the equity task force.

A state legislature-approved bill, awaiting Gov. Kate Brown’s signature, would allow school districts to vote on whether or not to continue to allow permitted, concealed firearms on school property. Redmond School District currently does not have a policy addressing visitors carrying weapons in schools, but staff and students are banned from doing so.

Salinas said she was unsure how she felt about banning visitors from bringing concealed guns to schools.

“As someone who comes from a family who owns guns, I don’t want to see our rights being taken away,” she said. “With that being said, I think it’s so important for our students to feel safe and be safe.”

Michael Summers, owner of Bend-based Summers Flooring and Design, said if elected, he hopes to heal the divide between school staff and some local families. The tension between the two groups got heated after COVID-19 mandates from Oregon Department of Education required students to learn online, he said.

“Teachers and administrators just got beat up last year,” Summers, 39, said. “I felt like I can come in and help.”

Summers has three daughters in Redmond schools — two in middle school at Redmond Proficiency Academy and one at Hugh Hartman Elementary.

One thing Summers wishes Redmond schools did better is keeping parents informed. For example, even though he was happy to hear of Mosaic Medical hosting vaccine clinics inside schools, he thinks parents weren’t given enough information about them.

“I feel like if parents can trust the board to keep them in the loop – especially on health-related things — that would ease so much tension,” he said.

The board should also be more clear to parents about the goals of the equity task force, Summers said. At the moment, some conservative families in Redmond are anxious about it, and they may want more involvement, he said.

“If they feel their input is taken into account, and they have a choice, then that unnecessary tension is diffused, and we can get somewhere,” Summers said.

Summers didn’t know enough about the guns-in-schools bill to have a strong opinion on it, he said.

If elected to the school board Rachel Visinoni — an office assistant and mother of a kindergartener at Tom McCall Elementary — said she’d push for more opportunities for open dialogue between parents and the district.

“We need to find that sense of community again, and a sense of compromise between the parent’s voices and the school board,” said Visinoni, 44.

Like Hartfield, Visinoni wants more extracurricular activities for elementary students. She also wants to host teacher-parent sessions, which could ease tensions between the groups, she said.

“If we need to do something like an open forum, where parents can ask teachers anything they need to, I think that would be incredibly beneficial,” Visinoni said.

If the Redmond School Board must make a decision on visitors bringing guns into schools, Visinoni would advocate for banning firearms on school property.

“I am 100% pro-second amendment, always have been, but I cannot think of any reason why a parent would need to bring a concealed weapon to a basketball game or parent-teacher conference,” she said. “Keep them in the car.”

Lacey Butts, whose name will appear on the ballot, is no longer running for office.